News

The Icy Truth Behind Neanderthals

Excerpts from an article published on the BBC News web site on 10th February 2005:

In 1848, a strange skull was discovered on the military outpost of Gibraltar.

The remains were named Homo neanderthalensis - or Neanderthal Man - an ancient and primitive form of human.

But was Neanderthal really the brutish ape-man of legend, or an effective rival to our own species? And how exactly had he been driven to extinction?

This week's Horizon programme brings together a team of leading experts to see just what we could find out about this remarkable creature, from the bones themselves. But to begin we needed a skeleton, and no complete Neanderthal has ever been found.

However, Gary Sawyer, a reconstruction expert at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, US, realised that enough partial skeletons existed to create an entire composite skeleton from casts of the fragments.